Interstate

Stephen Dixon Interstate

To Gusta and Gregory Frydman

~ ~ ~

Portions of Interstate have appeared in the following publications: American Short Fiction, Antietam Review, Antioch Review, Arts & Sciences, Asylum Annual 94 & 95, Bakunin, Boston Review, Boulevard, Cream City Review, Florida Review, Georgetown Review, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, Paris Transcontinental, Pequod, Triquarterly, and Western Humanities Review.

INTERSTATE

He’s in the car with the two kids, driving on the Interstate when a car pulls up on his side and stays even with his for a while and he looks at it and the guy next to the driver of what’s a minivan signals him to roll down his window. He raises his forehead in an expression “What’s up?” but the guy, through an open window, makes motions again to roll down his window and then sticks his hand out his window and points down at the back of Nat’s car, and he says “My wheel, something wrong with it?” and the guy shakes his head and cups his hands over his mouth as if he wants to say something to him. He lowers his window, slows down a little while he does it, van staying alongside him, kids are playing some kid card game in back though strapped in, and when the window’s rolled almost all the way down and the hand he used is back on the steering wheel, the guy in the car sticks a gun out the window and points it at his head. “What? What the hell you doing,” he says, “you crazy?” and the guy’s laughing but still pointing, so’s the driver laughing, and he says “What is this? What I do, what do you want?” and the guy puts his free hand behind his ear and says “What, what, what? Can’t hear ya,” with the driver laughing even harder now, and he says “I said what do you want from me?” and the guy says “Just to scare you, that’s all, you know, and you’re scared, right? — look at the sucker, scared shitless,” and he says “Yeah, okay, very, so put it away,” and the kids start screaming, probably just took their eyes off the card game and saw what was happening, or one did and the other followed, or they just heard him and looked or had been screaming all the time and he didn’t hear them, but he doesn’t look at them through the rearview, no time, just concentrates on the gun and guy holding it and thinking what to do and thinks “Lose them,” and floors the gas pedal and gets ahead of the van but it pulls even with him and when he keeps flooring it stays even with him and even gets a little ahead and comes back with the guy still pointing the gun out the window and now grinning at him, driver’s in hysterics and slapping the dashboard, things seem to be so funny, and he thinks “Should I roll the window up or keep it down, for rolling it up the guy might take it the wrong way and shoot, if he’s got bullets in there,” and he looks around, no other cars on their side of the Interstate except way in the distance front and behind, no police cars coming the other way or parked as far as he can see on the median strip, and he yells “Kids, get down, duck, stop screaming, do what Daddy says,” and sees them in the rearview staring at the van and screaming and he shouts “I said get down, now, now, unbuckle yourselves, and shut up, your screaming’s making me not think,” and slows down and rolls the window up and van slows down till it’s alongside him, the guy holding the gun out and one time slapping the driver’s free hand with his, and then the guy points the gun at the backseat with the kids ducked down in it and crying, maybe on the floor, maybe on the seat, for he can’t see them, and he swerves to the slow lane and the van gets beside him in the middle lane, and then he pulls onto the shoulder, stops, shifts quickly and drives in reverse on it bumping over some clumps, and the van goes on but much slower and from about a hundred and then two and three and four hundred feet away the guy steadies his gun arm with his other hand and aims at his car and he yells “Kids, stay down,” for both are now looking out the back, maybe because of the bumping and sudden going in reverse, and bullets go through the windshield. He screams in pain, glass in his head and a bullet through his hand, yells “Girls, you all right?” for there’s screaming from in back but only one of them, and his oldest daughter says “Daddy, Julie’s not moving, Daddy, she’s bleeding, Daddy, I don’t see her breathing, I think she’s dead.”

There’s a funeral next day, and day after it, while his wife and their families are mourning at his house, he goes out on the same Interstate searching for those guys, wishing he’d done it in the few hours of daylight he had the day before. He drives on it every day after that looking for them in one of the road’s rest stops or in the car they drove, a white fairly new minivan, Chevy or Ford, or in any vehicle they might have now, he wouldn’t think it’d be that van, though they could be that stupid or devil-may-care — swashbuckling, he was about to call it, when he meant swaggering, the fucking hyenas. He knows their faces, what they look like and, he thinks, what they like to wear. Knows it’s a long shot finding them, that they’ll probably stay off this road if they have any reason to be on it again, drug-trafficking maybe if that’s the right term for delivering drugs from one place to another, something he’d think they’d be in, or running guns, for another thing. But then they might think this route’s the best of any because it’s big and fast, for one reason, and it’s the last the cops might think they’d be on after what they did, if they even know about it from the papers and radio and such. Because for all they know or care about later they might think they only got the windshield, big laugh, but didn’t hit anyone or hurt anyone much except with maybe a little glass. Or maybe the driver had his eyes peeled to the road, and by the time the guy finished shooting the van was too far away for him to see if he hit anything, or the gun recoiled or whatever it does, banged him in the eye, even, no matter how hard he was holding it, so he didn’t even look to see or just couldn’t if he hit anything. They also might have been so far away from the shooting the next day that it wouldn’t have been news in the papers of the place they were in or on the radio and TV stations there, not that he believes they read the newsier part of the papers or listen to radio or TV news even when it might relate to them. Or they might have been too drugged or drunk to read, watch or listen, if they do do those things with news, or just too busy getting rid of the drugs or guns they were delivering or picking up or whatever criminal activity they were going to, for certainly some kind of crime like that’s what they’re in. So, a long shot but the only shot he thinks he has at finding these men, especially the guy who seemed to start it or was most involved in it and could have easily stopped it, the one with the gun, and finding them and getting even and making them die if he can, at his hands or the state’s, and if the state doesn’t do it then he’ll come with a gun to the courthouse last trial day to do it himself, or with a hammer, or better, a pick, and especially to that guy, is the only thing right now he wants to do.

He stays on the Interstate days for about ten hours each day for weeks, south at the big bridge through his state for eighty-four miles, direction he was heading that day, turning around at the state line and back north to the bridge, and so forth, north-south, south-north, every two hours or so stopping for coffee or a snack at one of the road’s rest areas where he looks around for those men at the restaurants and fast-food places inside and then outside in the lots which he drives around looking for the van, and occasionally there for gas where he asks the attendants if they’ve seen a white minivan lately, Chevy or Ford — even though when he saw newspaper ads of the different vans he couldn’t tell the two makes apart — he doesn’t know what state’s license plate but with one or two men in it looking like the ones he describes. Hand gets better, for a while had to steer and shift with the right, which took some getting used to, at the start of the search his wife telling him it’s understandable but a little crazy what he’s doing, risking his health by damaging his hand further, raising the chances of an accident by driving so much and so many hours a day and with a bad hand and staying awake through most of it on coffee, deserting his family when they really need him, maybe losing his job and draining their savings and just doing something useless and futile, for he’ll never find them, not one in a million will he ever even see them even driving the opposite way from him, and if he does hit that once and catches up with them they’ll probably kill him first second they recognize him, for they’re pros at it with no remorse at what they do while he’s just an inexperienced hysteric, and continues saying what he’s doing is crazy but not “a little” anymore or “understandable,” but he still does it, and longer he does greater the chance he’ll find them, he thinks — if they weren’t on the Interstate before they’ll be on it now, unless they got jailed or killed since because of the stuff they’re into, for they’ll feel it’s all blown over or almost and they can ride the Interstate again because nobody’s really out looking for them — takes a week-to-week work leave always saying he’s still in a state of shock over his daughter, eventually they ask him to see the company psychologist, and when he refuses — one reason, he doesn’t tell them, that it’ll take time away from his search and another that he doesn’t think the psychologist will believe him — then a private therapist he chooses who should send the report on him to them, and when he says rest’s all he needs, no doctor, they let him go.